Assessing the impact of socio-technical interventions on shop floor work practices

ABSTRACT

The successful introduction of new digital tools on the shop floor and the evaluation of their impacts on workers and their work practices are challenging tasks. Choosing and applying the right evaluation approach, methods, and measures to analyze the impact of digital interventions is a challenging task. To support researchers and practitioners in this challenge, the authors present a study out of the context of a large-scale European project, Facts4workers, which developed and implemented worker-centered smart factory solutions that support knowledge work on the shop floor level. Interventions through digitalization have increased workers’ job satisfaction, innovation and problem-solving skills, and productivity of organizations. The study demonstrates the context-of-use of socio-technical interventions at four case companies in Germany, Slovenia, and Spain. Combining different kinds of assessments, including quantitative (surveys) as well as qualitative data (interviews, observations) – the authors show how the digital solutions extend the workers’ knowledge and competencies and thereby enhance their problem-solving and innovation skills. The evaluation results enable us to deduce valid implications on how to introduce socio-technical interventions and to design ICT solutions that are supposed to address the productivity and more importantly the workers’ job satisfaction and innovation skills.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-technical interventions
• digital tools
• smart factories
• evaluation
• shop floor workers
• job satisfaction
• problem-solving
• innovation skills

Acknowledgments

This study has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement n° 636778.

VIRTUAL VEHICLE Research GmbH is funded within the COMET – Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies – program by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (bmvit), the Federal Ministry for Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs (bmdw), the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), the province of Styria and the Styrian Business Promotion Agency (SFG). The COMET program is administrated by FFG.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [636778].